There was nothing quick about how we arrived at the standardised second

Measuring the length of a second might seem simple, but this history of the time unit from TED-Ed shows how the road to the modern, standardised second was anything but. Written by John Kitching, a Fellow at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology, the video details how the advent of global communications and transit systems left the world in need of a more precise and universal understanding of a second – and how that search ultimately led to the atomic clock.